


hide behind the smoke

by coffeecrowns



Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical emotional devestation, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Child Abuse, Families of Choice, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Neurodiversity, Sasha doesn't have a particularly happy life but she does have a good one, Sasha is ND fight me, Self-Harm, Spoilers through Ancient Rome, nothing not part of canon but we talk about it more here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:15:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26610505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeecrowns/pseuds/coffeecrowns
Summary: Sasha Racket over the (statistically unlikely) many, many years
Relationships: Brock & Sasha Racket, Sasha Racket & Everyone, Sasha Racket & Zolf Smith
Comments: 6
Kudos: 24





	hide behind the smoke

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on my third relisten to RQG and if I think about Sasha for too long I burst into tears so this is me trying to process those feelings.

Her first memory goes like this: she’s young, she’s cold, she’s hungry. She doesn’t cry, mostly because she knows it won’t help. The area she knows always has a kid crying, and it seems to be futile. Her own tears make her angry, and she doesn’t even know why. But right now, she is not mad. A very tall man is angry. His skin is like hers, and so is the shape of his nose. 

“There you are!” He yells. He isn’t happy to see her. But he leads her to a small shack. There is another kid, which isn’t comforting. 

“This is your cousin, my son -” 

“I’m Brock.” The kid bounds over to her, rips his bread roll in half and offers her the larger piece. She knows to watch him take a bite first. Then she follows. It’s so soft she doesn’t know what to do and it’s all she wants to eat forever. 

“Sasha,” she mutters around her food. She hasn’t meant to close her eyes, but she finds she has to open them to see Brock beaming down at her. 

  
  


For a few years, Sasha is taller than Brock. It’s harder to keep up with jobs and Brock when she barely knows what to make of her limbs. Barret slapped her hard on the back in both pride and threat - “Glad to see all that food is going somewhere.” Sasha has never known what to say to Barret, or anyone other than Brock. She doesn’t reply, and that just becomes part of her life. 

They work hard. Baret has seized enough control to need constant effort to hold his territory. Sasha and Brock are good and trusted, easily overlooked. It isn’t good. She knows that. But it’s stable. And sometimes, when Brock meets people who become worth trusting, when there’s money to buy food just to eat it for fun, it’s nice. She’s alright being a tool, with the grime satisfaction of a job well done. 

Besides, it isn’t like there’s any other way to survive. 

Then it turns out it wasn’t even a good way to survive. Brock is gone. 

(She’s gotten rid of plenty of bodies, knows countless ways to kill, and she was prepared to find his corpse one day. Only there is nothing left behind of her best friend.) 

(She doesn’t even realize that she was lonely until she’s alone.) 

(Baret sees it too, hands her a ring a month after Brock dies. She doesn’t want to die even if she isn’t sure she wants to live. She puts it on her ring finger, because that’s the symbol that means she’s all in, that she won’t be a problem anymore.) 

Brock is gone and she’s never going to know if he would have ended up taller. 

  
  


Sasha sees the sun for the first time at fifteen. It’s too bright, and it hurts piercing her eyes right into her skull. She’s got a high pain tolerance, obviously. But she’s never experienced this sort of pain, and she tears up which is more than a little embarrassing, especially since she’s just been handed over (sold?) to this tall rich lady. 

“You’re certainly an investment,” Eldarion sighs. If Sasha hadn’t felt flayed open by the sun, it’s only gotten worse with Eldarion’s words. For a few moments, she had hoped for some sort of new start in Upper London. She thought she had squashed it down. But it dies an ugly second death with the stares and the eyes and the brightness and Eldarion’s cold words. 

(Later, she’ll learn she came up during the winter, and at least part of the awful brightness was the reflection of the sun against snow. She learns she has plenty of time to get to know the pitfalls of all the seasons.) 

Sometimes, when it is quiet in the big house, she hears the world get up around her. Sasha can ignore the posh room, the weight on the ring on her finger, the crushing loneliness. Before the sun actually rises, the natural brightness is nice. Warm and everything. She has a neighbour, and they don’t yell or threaten, but they lit a candle in the window every morning within five minutes of her own wake up. 

She keeps her own room dark. But across the street, she likes the little flame. 

The worst part of it is that sometimes she misses Eldarion when she’s away. It gets to her, all the time without talking. The only person who has ever waited for her to put her words together was Brock, and at least it was safe to say nothing in front of Barret. Well, not safe. But expected, understood, worked around. 

Now Eldarion demands eye contact and clothes that itch and explanations as to why she doesn’t know her birthday and calls her slow. And she knows she isn’t slow. She would have died long ago if she was. 

It’s not even a relief to work jobs. The things she’s learnt to appease Eldarion don’t work in Other London, and vice versa. It’s so much harder. She’s watched closer now, the relief of climbing and hiding are tainted by the weight around her finger. 

When Eldarion is gone and it’s just her and the maids, sometimes, after a job, she’ll find a closet to hide in. It’s not the same, and it nags at her to know it’s an exception, but she can shimmy her way up to the top of the closet, just in case she needs to get the drop. 

  
  


Eldarion decides she’s turning seventeen exactly two years into living with her. It’s time for her to be a Lady. 

She’s tasked with buying jewelry for her coming out. It’s an insult on every possible level. Only it introduces her to Bi Ming. He appreciates her clever eye and gives her the language for all the things she’s learnt to recognize. He’s quiet in similar ways, and understands that when she talks for ten minutes straight about a neat piece, it means she feels safe. 

A few months in, after a particularly bad job, he says: “If you ever decide you don’t like your current path, I have a spare room you can take on as my apprentice.” 

She’s pretty sure he wasn’t expecting her to take him up on it bleeding profusely and missing a finger. 

It hurts a lot to cut your own finger off. A lot. 

Bi Ming helps, after. 

(For longer than she’s willing to admit, she sees it everytime she closes her eyes.)

Meeting Zolf changes everything and nothing. She has no idea what to do with the fact she’s allowed to say no. 

Especially because she thinks about leaving London, seeing new things, doing new things, leaving Barret and all his hurt behind- and she wants to say yes. 

It goes like this: she saves people instead of hurting them and gets paid better for it. She starts meeting people that Barret has no ties to, no leverage over. She leaves London. She leaves England. She trusts Zolf, cares for Hamid, and laughs at Bertie. She sits on rooftops and talks to gargoyles and it’s like home but more complicated and under a big bright sky that shifts a little every new place she travels. She shares _looks_ and long silences with Zolf. Hamid doesn’t blink while paying for food she’s never been able to try before. Bertie gives her a golden brick wall to work around. She doesn’t always know what to do with them but she wants to figure it out. 

It goes like this: she collects scars. She nearly dies countless times. Sasha never expected to live even this long, but now she has. Now, when she feels the edges of her vision get swallowed in grey, her heart beats faster and she knows she isn’t ready to go yet. She wakes up underground beholden to something even worse than Barret and Brock is there, and Brock is ten years dead, and Brock still loves her. It isn’t fair, and it hurts, and it hurts in new ways and there’s something satisfying in the tragedy. Brock saves her and her new people she got all on her own, and then they save the world. 

It goes like this: she’s waking up bleeding from every scar she owns, the worst of her nightmares following cutting off her finger dialed up to eleven and comes to life. And then Zolf leaves. 

It goes like this: She meets Grizzop and she saves the world again and Bertie dies and Hamid’s sister dies and she leaves Europe. She meets Azu and she’s never had another girl who wanted to be her friend. She doesn’t know what to do with that but Azu understands she doesn’t want to be held and still likes her anyway. She saves herself with them all by her side. Grizzop cries when he yells and it makes her heart ache. Somehow, she’s gotten stronger than Barret ever was. Her life has gotten so much bigger that as much as it hurts to look at him, she can turn her back and let her friends deal with him. 

It goes like this: she walks into Rome following her friends despite everything she knows, because she loves them. And even after she’s left alone, two thousand years from everything she’s ever known, Grizzop’s blood on her hands, it’s having known them that allows her to walk back out. 

  
  
When Cicero finds the first kid, she thinks about Brock. She offers food and safety, better and more than she used to know. It just sort of spirals from there, and she never regrets it. Not with a gaggle of kids who have just been fast tracked to family. 

Three months in, she realizes she’s been two thousand years away longer than she was part of her great adventure. It hits her so hard she has to sit down. The kids are asleep but Cicero isn’t and she doesn’t cry, not when anyone could hear her. 

She climbs onto the roof of the empty villa they’ve set up in, and the night sky has more stars than she’s ever seen. Most of them are even the same. She sits for a while. And she thinks. 

Thing is, on her own, Sasha’s only ever been good at one thing. Thing is, she’s only felt whole doing something completely different. And with more wisdom than anyone ever thought to give her credit for, she starts to work. 

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes just the timeline of rqg breaks my heart. sasha doesn't have very long with these people who genuinely care about her so much that they changed her life and just... kill me. 
> 
> anyways thank you for reading this, i love you and i love sasha!


End file.
